For many of us, the idea of walking kilometers through knee-deep muck in a remote part of the Congo Basin’s rainforest sounds like either a great adventure or a cruel punishment. For me, trekking through the inundated forests and peatlands of the Congo Basin is my job. I’m an environmental archaeologist and I study how the settlement of the rain forest by humans over the last 10,000 years shaped this globally important biome. Peatlands matter to me because they are an archive of past vegetation, climates, and human history in the tropics of Africa.
We now know that peatlands play important roles in global climates and biodiversity because they store vast quantities of organic carbon and support global biodiversity. The waterlogged conditions of these environments also makes these areas ideal for studying their well preserved botanical remains. My research uses analysis of fossil plant pollen and charcoal to reconstruct past vegetation cover, which tells us about climatic conditions and human activities on the landscape in the distant past, especially where historic records are unavailable.
Studying the combined human-climate dynamics that impact tropical peatlands in Africa is important because it helps us understand how human-caused climate change and globalization may shape these vast carbon reserves in the future. A unique aspect of the research that I pursue is that by studying the natural history of the rain forest ecosystem I am able to help generate much needed data on long-term dynamics at the scale of centuries or millennia.
Understanding the long-term dynamics of the peatland system in the Congo Basin is also important for documenting the human dimension of the region. This is especially important in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there are few archaeological or paleoenvironmental studies. While there is a widely held assumption that rain forests are unchanging wilderness, the work of scientists from a range of fields from archaeology, biology, ecology, geology, and paleoclimates shows that these forests are dynamic; forest area has contracted and expanded in response to changes in global climates during the last ice age at 25,000 years ago and through the most recent climate interval known as the Holocene, which covers the last 10,000 years.
If rain forests are responsive to changes in global climate, then understanding past forest response to climate change is essential for designing and implementing effective conservation activities during future changes in global climates. The archaeological record of the region is also relevant to this problem because it is the only record of the long-term influences of human activities from swidden agriculture to commercial logging on this globally important biome. The peatlands of the Congo Basin have tremendous potential to provide exactly the sort of data that is needed to achieve these important goals.
Finally, an equally important aspect of these records is that they document the ecological impacts of the recent past. Over the last five hundred years the people and the environment of the Congo Basin have been dramatically transformed by the slave trade and European colonialism, yet there are almost no empirical records of how these events unfolded. Buried in the well preserved deposits of the Congo’s peatland is one of the only records of what life in this region was like before the arrival of European explorers, slave traders, and missionaries.
Over the last year, I’ve made three trips to the Democratic Republic of Congo to find and core tropical peat deposits for the valuable environmental data that they contain. These sites overlap with areas that have been highlighted by the exciting satellite studies published recently that show a much greater area of peatland in the region than previously expected. Not only does this information mean that this region plays a bigger role in global climates, but it is also an important opportunity to bring studies in natural history and archaeology together with studies of global climates and forestry.
Peatlands matter. As someone who studies the natural history of Earth’s biomes I see peatlands as a nexus or a crossroads where the past, the present, and future meet. This quality of peatlands means that they are a place where scientists, citizens, and people of different cultures can come together and learn something new. Deep in the forests of the Congo Basin, there is a vast archive of a globally connected world that can help all of us make a road map through an uncertain future.